“Mises cited a story told to him (third-hand) by his grandfather in 1910. It was a statement by Carl Menger, the founder of the "Austrian School" of economics.

The policies as conducted by the European powers will lead to a horrible war that will end with gruesome revolutions, with the extinction of European culture and the destruction of prosperity of all nations. In preparation for these inevitable events investments only in gold hoards, and perhaps in obligations of the two Scandinavian countries can be recommended.

Menger’s pessimism had long-term consequences for all of Western civilization.

He had transmitted this pessimism to his young student and friend, Archduke Rudolph, successor to the Austro-Hungarian throne. The Archduke committed suicide because he despaired about the future of his empire and the fate of European civilization, not because of a woman. (He took a young girl along in his death who, too, wished to die; but he did not commit suicide on her account).

Mises failed to mention the second remarkable connection between Menger’s pessimism and its results. Rudolph’s death in 1897 elevated his cousin, Francis Ferdinand, to the position of Archduke, heir to the throne of the Hapsburg (Austro-Hungarian) Empire. Rudolph had been a classical liberal, as was Menger; Francis Ferdinand, is described by British historian A. J. P Taylor as "violent, reactionary, and autocratic." It was his assassination by Serbian terrorists in 1914 which led to the outbreak of the war that Menger had predicted so long before.”

"The federal government is going to go bankrupt. It will default on Social Security. I knew that in 1959. We are closer to that day of default than we were in 1959. These things take time, as Menger learned. The difference is, the free market ideas of Menger are getting a wider hearing today than in 1933, 1953, or even 1983.

We are in a war of ideas. We have a moral obligation to defend verbally what we believe is true, namely, that no one can safely trust politicians’ promises. Our defensive tactics remain the same as they were in Menger’s day: we must not become dependent in our old age on government promises and central bank Money.

Ideas do have consequences. When the day of reckoning arrives, we may be in a position to help others, or at least not become a burden on others. We have greater responsibility because we know the truth.

As Jesus said long ago,

And that servant, which knew his lord’s will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. But he that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes. For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more (Luke 12:47–48).”

"It is important to remember that government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action. The funds that a government spends for whatever purposes are levied by taxation. And taxes are paid because the taxpayers are afraid of offering resistance to the tax gatherers. They know that any disobedience or resistance is hopeless. As long as this is the state of affairs, the government is able to collect the money that it wants to spend. Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen. The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom. "

Many associated with the Mises Institute have warned of this danger many times, but the closer that vouchers come to reality, the more the private schools themselves are understanding it just as well. See "Private Schools Leery of Voucher Trade-offs" in the Washington Post. What if schools that refuse to accept them face competitive pressures from those that do? The end result may be that all schools must accept government money to survive. This could be the legacy of the voucher movement, for which it ought to be held accountable by all who are concerned about the need to separate education and the state.

Now Israel and the Palestinians have returned to the familiar cycle of assassination following suicide bombing following assassination - as night follows day. The death toll for the past three years makes grim reading. At least 552 Israeli civilians have been killed in suicide bombings and other militant attacks, 100 of them under the age of 18; 246 Israeli soldiers have been killed on active duty.

At least 2,197 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli security forces. Figures on how many were civilians are hard to find, but a large proportion were civilians: at least 123 were militants assassinated by the Israelis, but 84 innocent Palestinian bystanders were killed in those assassinations. And 399 of the Palestinian dead were children, 200 of them younger than 15.

Despite three years of carnage, there is no indication either side has an exit strategy. The Israeli invasion and reoccupation of West Bank cities did not work. Nor did imprisoning thousands of Palestinians. Nor has a relentless campaign of 123 assassinations stopped the suicide bombers coming. Israelis continue to die when they get on the bus to go work or school, when they go out to a restaurant or a nightclub.

And life has become miserable for the vast majority of Palestinians. They too die on their way to work or school, hit by an Israeli helicopter rocket as the "collateral damage" of an assassination, hit by shrapnel in their homes during gun battles in the streets outside between the Israeli army and militants, or hit by the live ammunition Israeli soldiers fire at Palestinian children throwing stones at their tanks.

sexta-feira, 26 de setembro de 2003

Prices serve two functions. In the short run, prices serve a rationing function by increasing or decreasing in order to clear markets of shortages or surpluses. In the long run, prices serve a guiding function, by signaling to producers and consumers to put more or less resources in the affected markets.

If farmers produce too much food in the short run, prices decrease in order to clear the market. In the long run, farmers either decrease production or go out of business.

So if market forces didn't cause the surplus, what did? Price controls.

These professors have cause and effect precisely backwards. Price controls are not the necessary government response to overproduction. Overproduction is the necessary result of price controls.

When I mentioned to one of these professors that there was no need for the government to purchase wheat from farmers just to dump it into the ocean, because there would not have been a surplus in the absence of price controls, and that there were simply too many farmers in the market, the professor responded sarcastically, “So instead you want to push the farmers into the ocean?”

Speculation as to whether ex-commie turned neoconservative David Horowitz reads the junk he posts on his website before it goes up is rife with the appearance, the other day, of Greg Yardley's "The Trotsky Two-Step," the latest installment in the "Trotsky-con" debate.

An article by Jeet Heer in the National Post, pointing to the Trotskyist past of leading neocons – and suggesting that they have merely updated Trotsky's theory of "permanent revolution" on behalf of "democratic" globalism – has the Right in an uproar. Heers quotes blabbermouth Stephen Schwartz, another ex-Trot-turned-neocon, who proudly proclaims the "relevance" and "continuity" of Trotsky's thought for today. Ex-Stalinist-turned-neocon Arnold Beichman went ballistic at Schwartz's indiscretion, and now one Greg Yardley has taken up the question of whether Trotsky's ghost is currently haunting us, in (where else?) David Horowitz's Frontpage. The ex-Trotskyist credentials of leading war birds – influential Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya, Christopher Hitchens, Schwartz, Irving Kristol – are just a coincidence, says Yardley.

Oh, and, by the way, he too is an ex-Trot, a former member of the Communist League of Canada:

"Although both the Communist League and the Socialist Workers Party began quietly dropping the Trotskyist label around 1990, the other members reassured me repeatedly that this was merely a tactical issue. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, they felt that they could claim the sole mantle of Communism for themselves, and avoid confusing a working class that had never heard of Trotsky. And make no mistake – Trotskyism is a variant of Communism. This shouldn't be glossed over; ex-Trotskyists like myself are ex-Communists. But let me also make this clear - the transformation from Trotskyist to conservative involves a fundamental break with the main tenets of Trotskyism. By suggesting that a conservative can remain in some way a Trotskyist, the isolationist right traffics in oxymoron, and their conspiracy theories fail bitterly."

To begin with, I have never claimed, as Yardley avers, that neoconservatives are "secretly Trotskyists." The purpose of digging up the neocons' leftist roots is to point out that the content of their ideology may have changed, but the form – the clear pattern – remains all too constant.

Yardley cites anti-Stalinism and adherence to orthodox Marxist economic theory as the hallmarks of Trotsky's thought, but surely this could describe any number of non-Stalinist leftists, from anarcho-syndicalists to Bukharinites. What distinguishes Trotskyism from all the other variants of Communism is the theory of "permanent revolution."

Trotsky believed that socialism in one country could not long survive, and that the encirclement of the Soviet Union by the capitalist powers would soon bring the "workers fatherland" to its knees. According to the Trotskyists, communism had to be exported to other countries, by force if need be: anything less amounted to a betrayal of the revolution. The crux of their opposition to Stalinism was their militant internationalism.

The same militant internationalism is central to neocon ideology, with the goal of world communism abandoned for global "democracy." To pursue the phantom of "democracy in one country" is the mortal sin of "isolationism" – to hear the neocons tell it, the U.S. government has a duty to "liberate" the oppressed peoples of the earth. Anything less is a "betrayal" of American ideals. Their project to democratize the Middle East rests on the premise that democracy in one country, or region – the West – is unthinkable, on account of the existence of radical Islamism. Their answer to the terrorist threat is securing our "national security" via world conquest. It is Trotskyism turned inside out.

(…)

Yardley doesn't confide when he joined the SWP/CLC, but, writing under the pseudonym "Brian Sayre" – I'm assuming Yardley and Sayre are the same person, unless Horowitz has roped in two former Fidelistas who both happen to live in Canada – he states elsewhere on Frontpage:

"I began my career as a communist radical in Toronto in 1996, when I joined an organization called the Communist League of Canada. The Communist League was oriented towards factory workers; when I decided to go back to university in 1998, I left it and joined a mostly student communist organization called the New Socialists. Both of these groups were split-offs of split-offs, tracing their lineage back trough the 1960s left to the heyday of American communism. Although small in numbers, thanks to their activity they and other groups like them had a great deal of influence over the broader left. While in these groups, I helped organize and participated in many protests – demonstrations against "globalization," demonstrations against war, and demonstrations against the government. As a communist, I used people as simply means to an end. I discarded people as they ceased to be useful, and came to my senses only long after I was discarded in turn."

As a neocon, Yardley won't have to make much of an adjustment.

Ruthless, manipulative, power-hungry, and blinded by dogmatism: that's the neocons, alright. Although Yardley does make vague reference to having been "discarded" – perhaps in one of the periodic purges that routinely convulse the Barnes group – as a former member of an authoritarian cult, his transitioning from neo-Trotskyist to neo-conservative seems to have been relatively effortless.

Is Yardley such a humorless ideologue that he fails to see the irony of his own position? After all, here is someone converted to Communism in the year 1996, fer chrissakes, lecturing longtime conservatives on who is and is not a conservative. One might as well ask a former phrenologist to address a convention of brain-surgeons.

...

My spies inside Cato tell me that a recent purge of a prominent anti-interventionist scholar was not enough for the neocons: they want more heads. The neocon takeover of what was once a venerable libertarian institution – founded and named by the late Murray N. Rothbard – started with the addition of Rupert Murdoch to Cato's board of directors in 1997, but was never complete. This latest smear campaign is the signal that the neocons are moving in for the kill.

...
While we are at it, we should conduct ourselves with the practical idealism which we are known for. And the whole "where are the WMDs" business is happening at all because Bush and his crew felt the need to get U.N. support and talk about "resolutions" that were violated and all that hogwash. It didn't work, of course. The people who care about that crap would never, ever support him. So, what should have been a footnote is now a disaster for Bush: the basis for his "legal" argument is missing.

In Bush's efforts to put a Wilsonian cloak on this war, the focus on "legality" and "human rights" was an attempt to woo the very people who despise him, and he is losing his base as a result. When he announced the price tag to rebuild the place, he lost another huge slice of his supporters. Millions of people in this country absolutely loathe the idea of "foreign aid". They angrily begrudge every cent spent abroad. Bush's only hope to sell this program in Iraq would be to focus on American interests and what we get out of the lives and treasure being shovelled into the place. But Bush won't play it that way.
...
We have had a half-generation of people who have been taught that the GIs of WWII went forth to liberate a continent and restore freedom and democracy, and that this was a noble cause. That was true in part. But mostly they went because they were drafted, and after that it was to kick the shit of out of the Japs who bombed us and their pals the Nazis who declared war on us. These were the same people who watched Germany overrun Europe without blinking. That was far away and it was somebody else's problem. Only when we were attacked did the American public care about the war.

Bush has attempted to sell this war and its aftermath to the wrong people for the wrong reasons and they're not buying. The people who had supported him in a "war on terror" no longer support him in an expensive effort to build a modern, democratic Iraq, a sales pitch that would never have worked with them anyway.

It is probably too late for Bush to "just leave." And, at this point, it probably doesn't matter for him. Bush has lost his core political support at home as a result of these blunders, irrevocably I suspect, and unless he acts very decisively very soon in some very noticeable way, he is going to lose the 2004 election as a result.

"The Iraqi dictator must not be permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons." – George Bush, Oct. 7, 2002, in a speech in Cincinnati.

"The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program ... Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." – President Bush, Oct. 7, 2002, in Cincinnati.

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." – President Bush, Jan.28, 2003, in the State of the Union address.

"[The CIA possesses] solid reporting of senior-level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda going back a decade." – CIA Director George Tenet in a written statement released Oct. 7, 2002 and echoed in that evening's speech by President Bush.

"We've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases ... Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints." – President Bush, Oct. 7.

"We have also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We are concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] for missions targeting the United States." – President Bush, Oct. 7.

"We have seen intelligence over many months that they have chemical and biological weapons, and that they have dispersed them and that they're weaponized and that, in one case at least, the command and control arrangements have been established." – President Bush, Feb. 8, 2003, in a national radio address.

"Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets." – Secretary of State Colin Powell, Feb. 5 2003, in remarks to the UN Security Council.

"We know where [Iraq's WMD] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north somewhat." – Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, March 30, 2003, in statements to the press.

"Yes, we found a biological laboratory in Iraq which the UN prohibited." – President Bush in remarks in Poland, published internationally June 1, 2003.

GENEVA, New York - A 1948 attack by a Jewish militia on an Arab village drew an unlikely cast of visitors Wednesday to this small town in rural New York.

A group of Palestinians, Israelis and Americans dedicated a bronze statue of an uprooted olive tree to mark the attack that killed more than 100 Arabs in Deir Yassin, in what is now Israel.

In the struggle for Middle East peace, "it's very disturbing when one side's history is systematically ignored," said Daniel McGowan, who launched Deir Yassin Remembered in 1994. "It would be like nobody wanting to talk about the Holocaust when you talked about Jews."

The attack on April 9, 1948, killed anywhere from 108 to 254 villagers - the number is still debated - and accelerated Israeli expropriation of land."

Sobre o Haaretz

Haaretz is an independent daily newspaper with a broadly liberal outlook both on domestic issues and on international affairs. It has a journalistic staff of some 330 reporters, writers and editors. The paper is perhaps best known for its Op-ed page, where its senior columnists - among them some of Israel's leading commentators and analysts - reflect on current events. Haaretz plays an important role in the shaping of public opinion and is read with care in government and decision-making circles.

Haaretz was founded in Jerusalem in 1919 by a group of Zionist immigrants, mainly from Russia. Among its staffers was the Revisionist leader, Ze'ev Jabotinsky. The writer Ahad Ha'am was a frequent contributor during those early years.

"The monarchic, and aristocratical, and popular partisans have been jointly laying their axes to the root of all government, and have in their turns proved each other absurd and inconvenient. In vain you tell me that artificial government is good, but that I fall out only with the abuse. The thing! the thing itself is the abuse! Edmund Burke, 1756"

Sobre a experiência americana:

"We thought, Sir, that the utmost which the discontented colonists would do, was to disturb authority; we never dreamt they could of themselves supply it."

Sobre Massachusetts, Burke disse: "we were confident that the first feeling, if not the very prospect of anarchy, would instantly enforce a complete submission. The experiment was tried. A new, strange, unexpected face of things appeared. Anarchy is now found tolerable. A vast province has now subsisted, and subsisted in a considerable degree of health and vigor, for near a twelvemonth, without governor, without public council, without judges, without executive magistrates."

"Becker, 35, is to move his home and business to the tiny canton of Zug, which has one of the lowest rates of tax in the world.
...
Income tax rates in Germany reach 48.5 percent for top earners. In Zug, they rise no higher than 7 percent. "

"An intensive six-month search of Iraq for weapons of mass destruction has failed to discover a single trace of an illegal arsenal, according to accounts of a report circulating in Washington and London.

The interim report, compiled by the CIA-led Iraq Survey Group (ISG) of 1,400 weapons experts and support staff, will instead focus on Saddam Hussein's capacity and intentions to build banned weapons."

This paper was given at the Mt. Pelerin Society meeting in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on September 21, 2003.

Law, once a shield of the innocent, has become a weapon in the hands of government. Today anyone can be criminally prosecuted for offenses created by the indictment. What William Blackstone defined as law – "the Rights of Englishmen" – has been lost.

In the Anglo-American legal system, law consists of a few basic principles: due process, the attorney-client privilege, equality before the law, the right to confront adverse witnesses, and the prohibitions against crimes without intent, bills of attainder, self-incrimination, retroactive law, and attacks against a person through his property. Each of these protective principles has been breached.

The New Deal laid the groundwork for destroying the tort/crime distinction and using criminal sanctions to achieve public welfare goals. An important feature of New Deal legislation was congressional delegation of lawmaking power to regulatory agencies. Delegation combined statutory authority and enforcement authority in the same hands. The bureaucrats’ ability to define criminal offenses by their interpretation of the regulations that they write gives regulatory police vast discretion. (…) The bureaucrats’ ability to create criminal offenses spontaneously by interpretation makes law uncertain and incapable of fulfilling its purpose of commanding what is right and prohibiting what is wrong.
(…)
The Patriot Act and follow-up proposals are destroying habeas corpus and permitting warrentless searches and spying. Supposedly, these police state measures are directed toward terrorists, but they are certain to expand, just as asset freezes and forfeitures expanded.
(…)
The common law crimes associated with the poor – theft, assault, and murder – are well defined. Frame-ups for such crimes require prosecutors to suborn perjury, suppress exculpatory evidence, and coerce false confession. To frame a white-collar victim, a prosecutor need only interpret an arcane regulation differently or with a new slant.

To hold a CEO and CFO criminally liable for accounting misstatements that cannot be detected in advance is tyranny. Many justifications have been used for past tyrannies. We now have tyranny in the name of corporate governance and the prevention of accounting fraud.

terça-feira, 23 de setembro de 2003

In 1995, Gary Kleck published in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology of Northwestern Law School his now-famous paper, “Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun.” Among its unchallenged assertions:

Law-abiding citizens use guns to defend themselves against criminals 2.5 million times a year or about 6,850 times every day.

Of these 2.5 million self-defense uses of guns, more than 200,000 are by women defending themselves against sexual abuse. Often, a Saturday Night Special is a girl’s best friend.

11 out of every 12 times citizens use their guns in self-defense, they merely brandish them or fire a warning shot.
When citizens do fire, they shoot and kill twice as many criminals as do cops every year. But, while 2 percent of civilian shootings are of people mistaken for criminals, that is true of 11 percent of police shootings.

...

After the horrific L.A. riots of 1992, gun sales soared, as did citizen demands for a right to carry concealed weapons. Thirty-five states have now enacted such laws, and the crime rate has correspondingly fallen, as has the incidence of “rampage killings” in these states. It is a provable fact: the better armed the citizenry, the fewer predator crimes they will endure.

"What, then is the proper relationship of praxeology to values or ethics? Like other sciences, praxeology provides laws about reality, laws that those who frame ethical judgments disregard only at their peril. In brief, the citizen, or the "ethicist," may have framed, in ways which we cannot deal with here, general ethical rules or goals. But in order to decide how to arrive at such goals, he must employ all the relevant conclusions of the various sciences, all of which are in themselves value-free."

The World Trade Organization is supposed to be this great apparatus to push the world toward greater economic integration, a dream of the liberal school for many centuries. In reality, it was nothing but the resurrection of an old central-planning fallacy that world trade needs a central authority to manage it.

The rich nations (meaning, mainly, the US) swaggered into Cancun with an aggressive, three-pronged agenda:

- to foist a stricter system of investment rules (including patent and copyright enforcement) on developing nations,

- to extend US-style environmental and labor regulations to cover poorer nations,
and

- to reduce restrictions on exports to poor nations and foreign investment in them from the industrialized world.

From the beginning the WTO was based on the idea that spiffy industrialized nations need to find markets for their products among the sad-sack nations of the world – not that the poor nations might have something to sell that consumers in rich nations might want to buy.

That's why "intellectual property rights" (coercive monopolies for particular producers in rich countries) was high on the agenda but real-life free trade in agricultural goods was off the table completely.

Now, the problem here is obvious to anyone who knows basic economics. The comparative advantage that poor nations have in attracting investment and producing their own goods for exports is precisely their unregulated labor and environmental environments. Given that their object is to become more competitive, not less, it would make no sense to legislate higher wages that would only drive out capital and lead to more unemployment. If they stand a chance for development, tighter regulations on production are not the answer. What they need instead is an open marketplace in which to compete using their comparative advantage.

In the past, the anti-WTO protestors have claimed to be standing with the poor nations of the world against capitalist globalization, but the reality is much more complicated. By resisting the trend to "upwardly harmonize" regulations, poor nations of the world have stood firmly with the free-trade tradition. What they were arguing for, in reality, is not less globalization in general but less political globalization in order to make possible more economic globalization. The two forces are at odds with each other.

…That rich countries export highly subsidized farm products to the third world, to sell at prices cheaper than these countries can produce, is notable enough. But to then turn around and refuse to accept imports of low-priced goods on grounds that this constitutes "dumping," is adding injury to insult. In demanding more open markets and fewer subsidies, poor countries arrived with something approximating a traditional free-trade agenda.

As for the leftists who railed against globalization, they are right to have an inchoate sense that the WTO is up to no good. Beyond that, there is no agreement (...) You can't stand with both the poor and oppressed agricultural workers in the US and the poor and oppressed agricultural workers in the third world; ultimately they are competition with each other, and should be.
(…)
…industrialized nations now represent the greatest threat to free trade. As Nagasaki University's Dipak Basu explains: "High tariff against the exports of industrial goods from the poor countries cover 63 per cent of all export items of the poor countries. High tariff rates against the exports of agricultural products from the poor countries constitute 97.7 per cent of all agricultural export items of the poor countries. That is not all. Tariff rates escalate along with the amount of processing of a natural product."

Given this, what is needed is not another round of negotiations.

Let every nation, right now, do what is best for all citizens of the world: eliminate every form of intervention that would prevent or otherwise hobble mutually beneficial trade between any two parties anywhere in the world.

quarta-feira, 17 de setembro de 2003

Claes Ryn is a professor of politics at the Catholic University of America and chairman of National Humanities Institute.

Documento em Pdf com 15 páginas. Gosto desta:

"There are similarities between the advocates of the ideology of American empire and the ideologues who inspired and led the French Revolution o f 1789. The Jacobins, too, claimed to represent universal principles... the dominant Jacobins also wanted greater economic freedom. They thought of themselves as fighting on the side of good against evil and called themselves “the virtuous”…the result was protracted war and turbulence in Europe and elsewhere.

Those who embody the Jacobin spirit today in America have explicitly global ambitions. Is is crucial to understand what they believe, for potentially they have the military might of the United States at their complete disposal.”

Já agora, talvez seja bom relembrar as palavras do Catecismo sobre a Guerra Justa:“The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration. The gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy. At one and the same time:

- the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;

- all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;

- there must be serious prospects of success;

- the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modem means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

These are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the "just war" doctrine.

The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.”

terça-feira, 16 de setembro de 2003

OTTAWA, Canada (AP) -- Some of the first patients to smoke Canada's government-approved marijuana say it is "disgusting" and they want their money back.

Health Canada, the federal health department, started selling marijuana in July to bring relief to patients suffering from AIDS, cancer and other diseases. The move followed a court order that patients should not be forced to get their marijuana from drug dealers on the streets.

Let us imagine a new-born society: The men who compose it are busy working and exchanging the fruits of their labor. A natural instinct reveals to these men that their persons, the land they occupy and cultivate, the fruits of their labor, are their property, and that no one, except themselves, has the right to dispose of or touch this property. This instinct is not hypothetical; it exists. But man being an imperfect creature, this awareness of the right of everyone to his person and his goods will not be found to the same degree in every soul, and certain individuals will make criminal attempts, by violence or by fraud, against the persons or the property of others.

Hence, the need for an industry that prevents or suppresses these forcible or fraudulent aggressions.

...

In order to be able to guarantee the consumers full security of their persons and property, and, in case of harm, to give them a compensation proportioned to the loss suffered, it would be necessary, indeed:

1. That the producer establish certain penalties against the offenders of persons and the violators of property, and that the consumers agree to submit to these penalties, in case they themselves commit offenses;

2. That he impose certain inconveniences on the consumers, with the object of facilitating the discovery of the authors of offenses;

3. That he regularly gather, in order to cover his costs of production as well as an appropriate return for his efforts, a certain sum, variable according to the situation of the consumers, the particular occupations they engage in, and the extent, value, and nature of their properties.

...

If, on the contrary, the consumer is not free to buy security wherever he pleases, you forthwith see open up a large profession dedicated to arbitrariness and bad management. justice becomes slow and costly, the police vexatious, individual liberty is no longer respected, the price of security is abusively inflated and inequitably apportioned, according to the power and influence of this or that class of consumers. The protectors engage in bitter struggles to wrest customers from one another. In a word, all the abuses inherent in monopoly or in communism crop up.

Under the rule of free competition, war between the producers of security entirely loses its justification. Why would they make war? To conquer consumers? But the consumers would not allow themselves to be conquered. They would be careful not to allow themselves to be protected by men who would unscrupulously attack the persons and property of their rivals. If some audacious conqueror tried to become dictator, they would immediately call tot heir aid all the free consumers menaced by this aggression, and they would treat him as he deserved. Just as war is the natural consequence of monopoly, peace us the natural consequence of liberty.

...

On the one hand this would be a monarchy, and on the other hand it would be a republic; but it would be a monarchy without monopoly and a republic without communism.

On either hand, this authority would be accepted and respected in the name of utility, and would not be an authority imposed by terror.

quinta-feira, 11 de setembro de 2003

...why did Japan, an island nation smaller than Montana, attack the most powerful nation on earth? How did Hirohito and Tojo expect to win a war to the death with America that they must have known a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor would ignite?

... in 1931, Japan occupied Manchuria as a defensive move to secure her northern flank from Stalin who had seized Outer Mongolia and Sinkiang. Manchuria was as critical to Japan as Mexico is to us.

In 1937, following a clash on the Marco Polo Bridge outside Peiping, Japan and China went to war. For four years they fought, with Japan controlling the coasts and China the interior. For three years of this war, America saw no vital interest at risk and remained uninvolved.

But when Japan joined the Axis and occupied Indochina, FDR sent military aid to Chiang Kai-shek under lend-lease and approved the dispatch of the Flying Tigers to fight against Japan. He ordered B-17s to Manila to prepare to attack Japan’s home islands. He secretly promised the Dutch and British that, should Japan attack their Asian colonies, America would go to war. Japan was aware of it all.

Indeed, when Israel’s oil supply was imperiled by Nasser’s threat to close the Straits of Tiran to ships docking in Israel, the Israelis launched their own Pearl Harbor, destroying the Egyptian air force on the ground before invading the Sinai and ending the oil threat to Israel’s survival.

Nevertheless, knowing it meant war, FDR cut off Japan’s oil. Thus was the Japanese empire and national economy, entirely dependent on imported oil, put under a sentence of death.

Japanese militarists wanted war but the government of Prince Konoye did not. He offered to meet FDR anywhere in the Pacific. The prince told the U.S. ambassador that if oil shipments were renewed, Tokyo was ready to pull out of Indochina and have FDR mediate an end to the Sino-Japanese war. FDR spurned the offer.

Japan then sent an envoy to Washington to seek negotiations. On Nov. 26, Secretary of State Cordell Hull rejected negotiations and handed an ultimatum to the Japanese: get out of Indochina and China.

Japan faced a choice: accept a humiliating retreat from an empire built with immense blood and treasure, or seize the oil-rich Dutch East Indies. Pearl Harbor followed. The Tojo Doctrine of pre-emptive war.

Did FDR truly believe China’s integrity was a vital interest? Hardly. Once war broke out, China was ignored. The Pacific took a back seat to Europe. U.S. forces on Corregidor were abandoned. Aid to Churchill and Stalin and war on Germany took precedence over all.

At Yalta, FDR, without consulting Chiang Kai-shek, ceded to Stalin Chinese territories that were to be taken from Japan.

Was America’s war on Japan a just war? Assuredly. Were U.S. vital interests threatened by Japan? No. Provoking war with Japan was FDR’s back door to the war he wanted—with Hitler in Europe.

After a meeting with FDR, Nov. 25, Secretary of War Henry Stimson wrote in his diary that the main question is “how we maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.” That is the American way to war.

July 6, 2003 NYT: "The United States eventually won, but it was a long, hard, bloody slog that cost the lives of more than 4,200 American soldiers, 16,000 rebels and some 200,000 civilians. Even after the formal end of hostilities on July 4, 1902, sporadic resistance dragged on for years. There is no reason to think that the current struggle in Iraq will be remotely as difficult. But the Philippine war is a useful reminder that Americans have a long history of fighting guerrillas -- and usually prevailing, though seldom quickly or easily."

Hoje, uma nova Anti-Imperialist League foi formada por conservadores (Republican former counsel to first President Bush C. Boyden Gray; former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Charles Freeman, Jr.; President of the Institute for Middle East Peace and Development Stephen P. Cohen; William Nitze, son of Paul Nitze, the Reagan Administration's top arms control negotiator; and Washington businessman (and descendant of Revolutionary war patriot Patrick Henry) John B. Henry.) e cujo razão de ser é:

"Domestic liberty is the first casualty of adventurist foreign policy...To justify the high cost of maintaining rule over foreign territories and peoples, leaders are left with no choice but to deceive the people...America has begun to stray from its founding tradition of leading the world by example rather than by force."

quarta-feira, 10 de setembro de 2003

"Charles (Jack) Pritchard, the former special envoy for negotiations with North Korea, who resigned from the State Department last month, said the US must drop its opposition to one-on-one talks with North Korea and begin a "serious and sustained dialogue" to try to defuse the crisis.

Mr Pritchard embarrassed the Bush Administration by resigning on the eve of the six-way talks on the Korean crisis in Beijing in late August.

During the Washington forum on North Korea, a former US ambassador to the United Nations, Richard Holbrooke, played down any prospect of a US military strike on the North if talks fail.

The US military would not support a "surgical" strike on Pyongyang's nuclear facilities because it did not have the forces for a counter-attack if the North responded militarily, he said.

"Seventy-three per cent of all American manoeuvre battalions are now deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan," he said. The US military would be "violently opposed" to any military action on the peninsula."

"Old John Quincy Adams had it right when he said of America: "Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."

That was the traditional American foreign policy — armed neutrality. The imperialists slandered that policy by calling it isolationism, though it never was that. It was just the plain, sensible decision to mind our own business and not get involved in other people's quarrels and wars. We spent thousands of American lives in Korea, which remains divided, and in Vietnam, which went communist anyway. Now we are wasting American lives in Iraq, not to mention billions of dollars, when that country should have been no concern of ours at all.

The idea of intervening in the internal affairs of other sovereign nations is both stupid and hypocritical. It is stupid because we always lose more than we gain. It is hypocritical because we are far too cowardly to intervene in the internal affairs of really powerful nations. Despite all this hogwash about Saddam Hussein, the greatest mass murderers of the 20th century were the governments of the Soviet Union and communist China. They murdered millions. Did we launch a humanitarian war against them? Heck, no.

Even super-belligerent, "Bring 'em on" George Bush is dancing delicately around North Korea, because North Korea, unlike Iraq, has the military power to make us pay a high price for a war with it. One of the main reasons we went to war against Iraq was because we knew we could roll over the Iraqis. It was a political stunt to make the world think we are more powerful militarily than we actually are.

How much better it would be if we told the world, "We wish you well and we desire fair trade with all, but we will not interfere in your internal affairs, nor will we participate in any way with your quarrels with other nations or with your own people."

The fact is, our own country is falling apart, both morally and structurally. The stupid government in Washington is trying to build a world empire from a rotting base. Our own abortion mills have murdered more people than Saddam Hussein could have ever hoped to kill. Our own infrastructure is getting old and dilapidated while our emperor has committed us to rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure.

Until we relearn the valuable lesson of minding our own business, the future of this wannabe empire will be dicey, to say the least."

"NEW YORK -- Economist David Hale stunned Gold Show participants herewith news that the World Gold Council’s new exchange traded gold fund, Equity Gold, will launch in London at beginning of October, followed by New York at the end of the same month, Paris in early November and Hong Kong after that. "

terça-feira, 9 de setembro de 2003

"Make it simple and effective. Abolish all agricultural subsidies so that every proposed reform doesn't generate new escape routes that negate its primary purpose. To this end, the Guardian is starting a new website today, aimed at kicking into oblivion all agricultural subsidies (http://kickaas.typepad.com). This is one of those rare topics that unites right and left. It is also one of the few remaining free lunches in economics from which practically everyone gains. It would galvanise developing countries' agriculture while freeing more than $300bn currently being spent by governments - over $200 per capita"

"For intellectual support, neocon scholars promoted the pre-Christian romance of war, the idea that war gives life meaning and provides an essential opportunity for bravery, camaraderie, and the cultivation of character, in the life of the individual soldier and that of a nation.

It's all lies: war is about blood and destruction and nothing more. The destruction is wrought against the enemy and the victor. After the "heroic" and "noble" struggle is over, what are we left with? Debt, body bags, and a generation scarred by witnessing destruction on a scale no private parties could be capable of. War leaves in its wake a culture that has a lower regard for financial prudence, for freedom from leviathan, and for the value of life itself. War is uncivilized. It is a barbaric enterprise. It has never moved society forward. It is always a setback. It promises to give life meaning but ends in attacking the very source of meaning."

Morgan Stanley analyst Joachim Fels has penned an analysis of the bubble and crash cycle that could have been written by an Austrian economist. Fels has a very good idea of the way that injections of inflation by the central banks works its way into asset markets, causing bubbles and economic distortions.

The heroes and the villains in this story are the central banks, in my view. They have unleashed serial bubbles, time and again, by pumping excess liquidity into increasingly deregulated asset markets. And, over time, central bankers have become prisoners of their own (or their predecessor's) past actions. To address the serial bubble problem, central banks would need to both mop up the excess liquidity sloshing around in the financial system and redirect their monetary policy strategies. But, with the world economy still in a fragile state, at least partly due to the hangover from the greatest of all asset bubbles, neither seems particularly likely anytime soon, in my view.

In this striking passage, he emphasizes the notion of "mal-investment" - a wasteful redirection of resources that occurs when market prices and interest rates are distorted by inflation:

In the mid-1990s, excess liquidity started to fuel a worldwide equity rally and also found its way into the Asian emerging markets, where it fed a massive waste of capital.

sexta-feira, 5 de setembro de 2003

"In 1898, the Anti-Imperialist League was established to oppose America's territorial expansion, especially the "liberation" of the Philippines from Spain. Long before a President talked of an "axis of evil" and "regime change," or before Trent Lott and John Ashcroft accused critics of aiding the enemy, President William McKinley and his men attacked members of the League for opposing an America that projected its ideals abroad by force.

Imperialism, League members argued, was unjust, unnecessary and harmful to America's national interests. The league had a diverse membership featuring many respected public figures like Mark Twain, historian and industrialist Charles Francis Adams, Harvard professor and writer William James, financier Andrew Carnegie, reform journalist and senator Carl Schurz and The Nation's founding editor and prominent abolitionist E.L. Godkin.

League members drew a dramatic contrast between America's proud history as the land of liberty and its brutal repression of the Filipinos' struggle for independence. Such militaristic tyranny, they argued in their national platform, would ultimately erode the country's "fundamental principles and noblest ideals."

As Charles Eliot Norton, a founding member of the League, said: "It is not that we would hold America back from playing her full part in the world's affairs, but that we believe that her part could be better accomplished by close adherence to those high principles which are ideally embodied in her institutions--by the establishment of her own democracy in such ways as to make it a symbol of noble self-government, and by exercising the influence of a great, unarmed and peaceful power on the affairs and the moral temper of the world."

Fast forward a hundred years and meet the "Committee for the Republic." The Committee, recently formed to ignite a discussion in the establishment about America's lurch toward empire, includes Republican former counsel to first President Bush C. Boyden Gray; former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Charles Freeman, Jr.; President of the Institute for Middle East Peace and Development Stephen P. Cohen; William Nitze, son of Paul Nitze, the Reagan Administration's top arms control negotiator; and Washington businessman (and descendant of Revolutionary war patriot Patrick Henry) John B. Henry.

The Committee's draft manifesto includes language the Anti-Imperialist League would recognize: "Domestic liberty is the first casualty of adventurist foreign policy...To justify the high cost of maintaining rule over foreign territories and peoples, leaders are left with no choice but to deceive the people...America has begun to stray from its founding tradition of leading the world by example rather than by force."

Committee members say the group may create a nonprofit organization and will sponsor forums examining how imperial behavior weakened earlier republics, starting with the Roman Empire. "We want to have a great national debate about what our role in the world is," says Henry. The Committee is also considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values."

In my mind, these latter day anti-imperialists are charter members of the Coalition of the Rational--an embryonic idea I recently proposed to bring a broad, transpartisan group of concerned members of the establishment together to mobilize Americans in informed opposition to the Bush Administration's extremist undermining of our national security.

The Committee's creation is yet another sign of how mainstream members of the conservative establishment are waking up to George W's (mis)leading of the country into ruin. (Paleocons like Patrick Buchanan have also lined up against Bush's empire-building.) After all, imperialism is just as un-American today as it was at the turn of the century--or in 1776.